Michael Robotham - Bleed For Me

‘Can you raise twenty thousand?’

‘That’s a lot.’

‘It could have been worse.’

‘Call Ruiz. He’ll know what to do.’

This time I’m placed in a different holding cell. Three men sit on separate wooden benches against the walls. All of them are wearing suits, but only one of them leans forward to stop the jacket from creasing.

I recognise them from photographs. The nearest is Gary Dobson. Next to him is Tony Scott and sitting slightly apart from them is Novak Brennan. I know what I’ve read about them. Scott is six foot tall, shaven headed, a veteran football hooligan who has served time for assault and robbery. Dobson is shorter, stockier and ten years younger with convictions for car theft, drug possession and assaulting a police officer. Both men drank at the same pub and were activists for the BNP.

Brennan was a party candidate at the recent council elections. He narrowly missed winning a seat on Bristol City Council because the Labour Party withdrew its candidate and urged its supporters to vote for the Liberal Democrat, ensuring the BNP couldn’t win the contest.

Brennan looks younger in the flesh, with barely a line on his face. His trademark thick dark hair is brushed back from his forehead and he has laughter lines around his eyes. Unlike his fellow accused, his suit doesn’t look like a straitjacket.

Scott and Dobson acknowledge my arrival by making eye contact. Brennan is picking at his manicured nails, elbows on his knees. I take the bench opposite. The walls have been recently painted. Without the graffiti I have less to read and more time to think.

I find myself staring at Brennan. His eyes lift and meet mine, locking on to a place inside my head. I glance away, staring at the floor.

I’m holding my breath. When I realise, I exhale too quickly.

‘How’s the trial going?’ I ask.

The three of them are staring at me now.

‘I just got bail,’ I explain. ‘I’m waiting for someone to post it.’

‘Big fucking deal,’ says Scott, shaking his head.

Brennan continues to stare at me as if he’s trying to examine my conscience.

‘Congratulations,’ says Dobson, who seems happier to talk to someone. ‘What didn’t you do?’

He laughs.

Brennan takes a moist paper cloth from a small travel pack in his pocket and begins carefully wiping his fingers one by one, almost polishing his fingernails.

‘You must be getting sick of being in that courtroom,’ I say.

He raises a forefinger, signalling me to stop. ‘Do you know the first lesson you learn in a place like this?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘You learn to keep your mouth shut just in case the person they put in the cell with you is a snitch who’s going to claim later that he heard you say something you didn’t say.’

His accent is slightly Irish. The North. Belfast maybe.

‘I’m not a snitch.’

‘Oh, so you brought references did you?’

‘No, I mean . . .’

‘Best you not say anything.’

I nod and he goes back to cleaning his hands.

Julianne told me that he didn’t look like a monster. I wanted to tell her that they rarely ever do, bad people. They don’t have a rogue gene or a tattoo on their foreheads and, despite what people seem to think, you can’t ‘see it in their eyes’.

A few minutes later Brennan, Scott and Dobson are led upstairs and their trial resumes. Julianne will be there. Her witness gives evidence today. The survivor.

Two hours later I step outside the crown court registry office alongside Ruiz, who posted my bail.

‘Where did you get twenty grand?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You put up your house.’

‘More fool them - it’s falling down.’

‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Just make sure you turn up for the hearing or I’ll track you down myself and kill you.’

We’ve spent the last hour waiting for the paperwork to be approved while I recounted what happened yesterday - first with Sienna, and then Gordon Ellis. As I told him the story, I could see every turn in the road, every dip and curve, every fuck-up. When I reached the point where Ellis claimed to have slept with Charlie, I could feel the temperature rise in Ruiz.

‘It’s not true,’ he told me. ‘Charlie’s too bright for that.’

‘I know. I wish I could have been thinking more clearly at the time. Instead I wanted to kill him.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t go publicising the fact.’

We’re standing on the steps. The street outside is empty except for police and a handful of protesters who have stayed behind. Ruiz unscrews the lid from his sweet tin and pops a boiled lolly on his tongue.

‘You medicated?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You should get some sleep.’

‘I have to talk to Julianne. She’s working today. Translating.’

I glance towards the courthouse and try to push away the memory of her watching me standing in the dock. The look she gave me. Blank. Empty.

‘Which court is she in?’

‘The Novak Brennan trial.’

Ruiz seems to taste something in his mouth that turns sour and unpleasant. He spits the sweet into the gutter where it shatters against the concrete.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You know Brennan?’

‘Yeah, I know him. We go way back.’

‘I just spent an hour in a holding cell with him.’

‘Then you might want to shower.’

Planting his hands in his coat pockets, Ruiz stares indolently into the pearl-grey sky, but his gaze has turned inward, replaying past events in his head. Clearing his throat, he begins talking about his years in Northern Ireland when he was seconded to work with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, monitoring intelligence on IRA terror cells operating on the British mainland but controlled from Belfast.

‘A prostitute called Mae Grace Brennan died of a drug overdose in a bedsit on the Antrim Road in 1972. It was just after Bloody Friday. She was dead two days before the neighbours broke into her flat. They found Novak and his sister living in filth. Novak was three, Rita only nine months. The baby was so undernourished she had bleeding sores on her buttocks and back. Novak could barely walk.

‘Brother and sister were made wards of the court and fostered. A Methodist minister and his wife adopted them, but the die was cast early when it came to Novak. He had behavioural problems which saw him expelled from school and given counselling from the age of seven. When he was ten he killed the family cat by throwing it against a wall after it scratched him. Four years later, he beat up the minister’s wife so badly that she had to be hospitalised.

‘The family gave up and Novak and Rita were taken back into care. Four months later they ran away and finished up on the streets of Belfast. It was 1983, just before I started my secondment.

‘That December the IRA set off a car bomb outside Harrods and killed six people - three of them coppers. I knew one of them. Inspector Stephen Dodd. He died on Christmas Eve. We were trying to trace the men responsible and the trail led to Belfast.’

Ruiz registers the passing of a police car. The windscreen catches the light like a camera flash and two men in uniform watch us as though we’re middle-aged suicide bombers.

‘What happened to Novak and Rita?’ I ask.

‘They lived on the streets, in squats, deserted factories and freight cars. Then Novak came up with a honey-trap scam. Rita used to dress up in a short leather skirt and boob tube, wandering up Adelaide Street, drawing attention from the johns. She lured them into a dark alley, unzipped them and got on her knees. That’s when Novak crept forward and tapped Rita on the shoulder, aiming a knife at their soft bits and demanding money.